Turmoil in Yugoslavia
Regarding your editorial “Blue-Beret Power: Now It’s Yugoslavia” (March 14):
A thesis that Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic can be compared on the same scale, implying that they are equally responsible for this bloody conflict, is completely divorced from reality. Their respective roles in the current conflict, the time and context of their coming to power and the political systems they profess have been utterly different.
It is very convenient for the Western press to assume a position of presumed evenhandedness and treat this conflict as a chain of bloodthirsty revenge between the two mad tribes: Serbs and Croats. In its essence, this is a conflict between two political systems. One--neo-Stalinist (Serbia and its tiny satellite Montenegro) which refuses to undertake any economic changes and decides instead to seek national unity and prosperity by an aggressive territorial expansion; and the other--democratic (in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia), which chooses the painful path of economic restructuring and liberalization.
KSENIJA MARINKOVIC, Los Angeles
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